Humanistic aspects of cancer care

editor: Małgorzata Pasek

Wydawnictwo Akademia Tarnowskiej, Tarnów 2024, 167 pp.

ISBN 978-83-970661-8-2

DOI 10.55225/9788397066182

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Cancer is one of the main causes of death in the world.

The introduction of multidisciplinary therapy methods and their effectiveness changed its status and it became a chronic disease. This situation has significantly contributed to extending the lives of patients, but also to the emergence of new problems both for patients and their relatives.

The fragility, delicacy and complexity of the situation in which the patient and his family find themselves require from the people they meet on their path to recovery not only thorough knowledge and skills, but also an unconventional approach and an attitude full of humanism and understanding.

To paraphrase the famous poem by Wisława Szymborska, Nothing twice, no two patients are the same, their life histories, therapy paths followed by health problems are the same and followed in the same way.

We doctors, regardless of our professional experience and length of service, will never be convinced that we know everything and there is no situation that will surprise us. Therefore, creating a platform for mutual exchange of experiences complements conscious professional practice based on scientific evidence.

In the “world of cancer”, when the patient and their loved one will be the center of attention, when their voice will be heard and noticed, when it will be taken into account in planning oncological care, it will be possible to expect that the standards of practice are at the highest level.

We present to you the monograph Humanistic aspects of cancer care. It is the culmination of a project implemented at the Tarnów University. We invited speakers from the conference held on September 7, 2023 in Tarnów to write chapters.

We received six interesting articles, the subject of which fits into the holistic, multidimensional approach to care for oncology patients and their loved ones.

In the following chapters, we present summaries of all works and present interesting oncological issues in the form of posters.

(M. Pasek, Foreword)